3 of the NFL’s Greatest Moments
By Space Coast Daily // August 20, 2020
Of all the world’s major sports, few can compare with NFL football for sheer spectacle. With packed stadiums holding up to 100,000 passionate fans, cheerleading teams urging the players to do their best, and the exhilarating action on the field of play, it’s no wonder that it’s so spellbinding.
So it’s also not surprising that it’s a game that regularly produces iconic and unforgettable performances and moments from teams.
Of course, these aren’t restricted to the highest level of the game, the lower leagues can be just as extraordinary. For proof, you need to look no further than Brevard County’s very own Merritt Island Mustangs who, over the 1971 and 1972 seasons only lost one game, going down by the narrow margin of 25-27 to state champions Fort Pierce Central.
But, the Mustangs’ heroics aside, here are three of the greatest moments even seen in recent NFL history.
Super Bowl XLIII: Pittsburgh Steelers v Arizona Cardinals, 2009
In a game of extraordinary stats, with just 41 seconds of the match left to play, the Steelers were trailing by three points. The quarterback Ben Roethlisberger threw a 6-yard touchdown pass to teammate Santonio Holmes to snatch victory at the very last moment.
This made the Steelers the first ever team in NFL history to win the Super Bowl six times, although they are still waiting for a seventh victory.
Baltimore Ravens v Denver Broncos, 2012
Up until this point, the Ravens had endured a terrible season. It looked like this game would be no different as they trailed the Broncos by 28-35 with a minute and no timeouts remaining.
But a miracle 70 yard pass from Joe Flacco, now in a backup role with the Jets, found Jacoby Jones who passed two defenders to make the touchdown. After no less than two periods of overtime the Ravens went on to win, subsequently taking the Super Bowl for the second time in the team’s history.
Atlanta Falcons v Green Bay Packers, 2016
It’s fair to say that the Packers didn’t know what had hit them when the Falcons rolled into town. Leading the way, the Falcons QB Matt Ryan threw for 271 yards and achieved two touchdowns in the first half alone.
He also completed a 14-yard score and later hit home again with a 73-yard scoring pass to Julio Jones giving the Falcons a 31-0 lead. The final score was 44-21, Atlanta’s second-highest score ever in a playoff game.
As well as all of the excitement and buzz that’s always around games like these, it also involves a great deal of action around betting too.
This has also seen many betting sources starting to offer their personal picks on some of the best value bets to look out for. As a game that’s as driven by stats as by results, there are countless different bets to place, from the yardage a particular player will cover in a given match or season to who will be voted MVP of the year.
When it comes to betting on the games themselves, it can seem a little confusing at first, but once you try your hand at it, the process becomes pretty easy to understand once you have got used to the language used.
Rotation number
The rotation number is a number given to a particular team for a particular match and is common across all sports books. It’s this number that you quote when you want to place any bet on that particular team.
Point spread
This is a sort of handicapping system that is put in place to even out the bets that sports books may receive. For the favorite team it is a negative number, for example -10.5 and for the non favorites it is the positive version of that number, in this case +10.5.
At the end of the game, the relevant number is added to the particular team’s score to give the result of the bet. So, if, for example, you bet on the favorites to win – Team A with a -10.5 spread – and they beat Team B by 47-32. After the deduction of 10.5 the score would be 36.5-32 and you would still win. But if the final score was 40-32 it would be 29.5-32 and you would lose.
Moneyline
The moneyline is a more straightforward kind of bet simply on whether a team will win. Again, it’s expressed as a positive or negative number. The favorite team is given a negative number that expresses how much you need to bet to win $100.
The team for the non-favorites is a positive number and is the amount you will win for a $100 stake if they go on to win. There is a link between the point spread and the moneyline so the lower the former, the lower the latter will be.
Total
Finally, there’s a number called the Total that you can bet on. This is the total number of points that are going to be scored in a game and the bet is whether the total will be higher or lower than this figure at the end of the game.
So, if you’ve never experienced the added enjoyment that putting on a bet can add to watching a game, maybe now’s the time. And maybe you’ll also see another iconic NFL moment or two in the process.
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